Our website uses cookies to improve your user experience. If you continue browsing, we assume that you consent to our use of cookies. More information can be found in our Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy.

Q&A: Ian Grant of Encyclopaedia Britannica UK

Ian Grant is the MD of Britannica UK, responsible for the EMEA regions. I’ve been talking to Ian about how EB has adapted to the internet, the threat from Wikipedia, and its plans for the future…

Has Encyclopaedia Britannica been slow to adapt to online competition?

I think one thing that hasn’t been made clear when we are discussed in relation to the internet is the fact that Britannica has been online for the last twelve years. Also, the consumer website that most web users will know of is a small part of our overall business. The larger point is that we have four main areas where we cater for customers online: consumer, academic institutions, libraries, and schools.

What proportion of EB’s revenues come from its online operations?

Roughly 60% comes from online, of that around 15% comes from subscriptions to the consumer version of the websites, so this represents a relatively small pat of our business.

I did read your article and thought that the comments you made, such as the issues with client side scripting slowing the site down, and the search function, were appropriate. We did redesign the website recently, it was much plainer before, but we are doing a lot of reviewing and testing at the moment, as we look to improve.

Also, our president Jorge Cauz has been talking recently about giving people more ability to contribute to the site by editing articles that are already on the site and adding new content.

How will this process work? Will it be as open as Wikipedia?

We have a strict editing process that any new edits and entries have to go through before they will be added to the website or the published editions of the encyclopedia. Entries will have to be fact-checked by our staff.

Britannica has 4,500 contributors around the world, consisting of academics and various other experts in their fields, and their entries and edits have to go through a team of 100 editors before approval. This rigorous process is what makes EB reliable, and we would not compromise and risk lowering the quality of our content.

We are testing the offer of a space for people to comment on our articles, update or check any facts, and write additions to our articles. If we feel that material submitted by the public is suitable for publication and incorporation into the encyclopedic database, then it will be assessed, fact-checked, edited for style and incorporated into the database, citing the writer responsible for the edits.

Finding the right balance between user-generated content and curated information is a challenge, and something which we have in common with newspapers, as they adapt to online trends.

Can you update articles as quickly in response to changing events?

We update on a daily basis, but it still goes through the editorial process. Our editorial team has changed its practices on this in the last three years. For instance, we were able to update entries related to Benazir Bhutto in response to her assassination last year. Her Britannica biography, and entries on Pakistan and India were all updated and published online within two hours. This was not a wikipedia-style process but a curated process.

Britannica doesn’t provide news or current affairs, so it is not as important for us to update as quickly as the BBC or to provide instant comment on events. What we do well is to provide deep context, to give people the history behind events and tell users about the details underlying events.

The value we deliver is that of confidence – users can have confidence in the accuracy of the information we supply.

How much of a problem is the popularity of Wikipedia?

I think the comparison is a non-debate, because we offer something very different. Wikipedia is a fun site to use and has a lot of interesting entries on there, but their approach wouldn’t work for Encyclopedia Britannica.

My job is to create more awareness of our very different approaches to publishing in the public mind. They’re a chisel, we’re a drill, and you need to have the correct tool for the job.

Is Britannica profitable?

Yes, across the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions I am responsible for, we have grown the business in each of the last two years. This is in our three main categories of users, academic institutions, schools and consumers, and these customers are prepared to pay for the quality of content and the confidence in the material that we offer. The subscription renewal rate for institutions like libraries is about 98%.

Have you considered going for a free model for the consumer site to attract more traffic and links?

The site was free at one point, about eleven or twelve years ago, but perhaps we were too far ahead of our time then. We had no commercial model, our servers crashed with all the traffic to the site, and the changes didn’t work at all. This model was introduced by the new owner at the time, who felt we had to adapt to the internet, and it took us years to recover from this.

Even now, I’m not convinced that the free, ad-supported model for the consumer website would work. Advertising can be hard to come by and undermines the value proposition.

There is value in the publishing process which articles on Britannica go through, and we have to balance the need to pay professional contributors, writers and editors
in order to maintain the quality element of our proposition with the
mission to deliver globally online and in print timely information in
which users can have complete confidence in.

One example we have to be wary of is German publisher Brockhaus, which has been published since 1808. It tried and failed to move everything online by providing free editorial material supported by advertising. It’s a dangerous approach.

People can still link to our content and visitors will be able to access articles on the site, though at some point, Britannica says its product has a value and provides the offer of a month’s free trial. Once users take up this offer, we have very high conversion rates – up to 50%.

However, it’s important for us to get across to people the value of the content, so we are looking at alternative ways of doing this.

How important is SEO for Britannica?

Google is an important channel to market, and we have been using it to promote niche areas, such as our recently launched products for homework help. We rank well for phrases related to this area. We employ a search agency to look after this and our paid search marketing.

Recommended

Social marketing, Web 2.0 – whatever you call it, proponents and gurus of the forms on online marketing that involve consumer-generated media and user participation constantly stress the conversational aspects of marketing in Web 2.0 channels. Some have gone so far as to dub this “conversational marketing.”

All those drop-what-you’re-doing news bulletins that begin, “The blogosphere is buzzing about…” are so 2005. The latest channel to attract attention is the first one that’s literally a conversation: Twitter.

Slews of marketers are jumping into Twitter with both feet to participate: to show off domain knowledge, create promotions on-the-fly, to publicize upcoming events and sales – the possibilities are endless.

But what very few marketers, advertisers and brands are listening to Twitter – they’re reiterating the same mistakes they made at the very beginning of Web 2.0.

Sarah Fay, the chief executive of Aegis Media North America, is known for her smarts, a genuine warmth, and not incidentally, the fact that she’s one of the most powerful women in advertising in North America, if not the world.

A 10-year veteran of Carat, Fay has steadily risen in the ranks until she ultimately achieved the top slot in 2007, when the company merged the digital and traditional media assets of Carat and Isobar into a single integrated operating unit.

We caught up with Sarah to ask about advertising in a recession, trends in media buying, and what’s been surprising and inspiring her since she took up the reins at Aegis.

Recently, an underground rethinking of blogging practice began to hit the headlines; that of Slow Blogging. In a nutshell, this is where blog-posts are generated over a length of time with the aim to display a deep knowledge of the subject matter, rather than churning out quick content at a regular pace.

Displaying a thorough understanding of their services, products and industry can be highly beneficial to the promotional and marketing activities of many businesses, but at what speed should we really be blogging?

Yahoo just went where other search engines have gone before. It just introduced a new tool called Search Pad that allows users to save links, type notes, copy and paste web content and to share all that information via email, if that’s the user’s wish.

In limited release, the tool rolled out to some users today, but won’t be broadly available for a few months.

Yahoo’s announcement comes in the wake of Google saying it will mothball its own notebook feature. Other players, including Evernote and Zoho, have similar offerings, as does Ask.com. Oh, and Microsoft is testing Thumbtack. It’s a trend!

According to a newly-published study published by Pew, nearly three-quarters of Facebook users polled said they didn’t know that Facebook generates and stores data about their interests and traits, and, when they came to learn this, over half indicated that they were uncomfortable with Facebook’s practice.

Mastercard, the third-largest credit card processor in the US, has announced a new policy that will make it more difficult for some businesses to automatically convert free trials into recurring subscriptions.